Venezuela: The Coup That Failed

I wrote a story for the New Republic yesterday, in which I went out on a limb and predicted that the Trump administration’s efforts to overthrow the socialist government would fail. As I said:

For some time now, Trump’s obsession with imperial warmongering has focused on toppling the Venezuelan government of Nicolás Maduro, whether via economic pressure, a U.S.-sponsored military coup, or provoking a joint invasion by Brazil—led by that great democrat Jair Bolsonaro—and Colombia, where “democracy” has been built on mass graves for the past half-century.

In his quest, Trump is clearly being led by the nose of the Troika of Terror: Florida Senator Marco Rubio, U.S. national security adviser John Bolton, and the Trump administration’s special envoy for Venezuela, Elliott Abrams. (Abrams’s sterling successes have included false testimony over the Iran-Contra affair, propping up murderous regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador, and helping to promote the Iraq War.) In recent weeks, both Rubio and the Miami Herald have been predicting Maduro’s impending demise.

I don’t like Maduro much. But for now, I think those predictions are wrong: Maduro is pretty well ensconced in his presidential post. And any attempt to remove him would be foolish.